rfmcdonald | [PHOTO] Seven photos from Sherbourne Common

On Sunday the 19th, I'd the good chance to explore Sherbourne Common with Paul. This municipal park straddling Queens Quay in the emergent East Bayfront, on the waterfront east of Yonge Street, turned out to be a brilliant achievement aesthetically and technologically. This stormwater treatment facility, first opened in 2010 and completed the following year, looks good. The praise delivered by Christopher Hume in the Toronto Star in September 2010 is entirely accurate.

Designed by Vancouver-based landscape architects Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, with help from The Planning Partnership; Teeple Architects and artist Jill Anholt, the project is a brilliant combination of beauty and banality.

Torontonians got their first look at Sherbourne Common on Friday, when it opened — well, partially opened. Located at the foot of Sherbourne St., it stretches from Lake Shore Blvd. to Lake Ontario. The 1.5 hectare-acre site is bisected by Queens Quay. For now, only the bottom part of the park is accessible. The section north of Queens Quay will be under construction until November.

So far, the Common consists of several rows of maples stretching the length of the park. They culminate in a large field that reaches to the boardwalk that will eventually run along the water’s edge, east to Parliament St. and beyond. A zinc-clad pavilion houses a café on one side and hides water-treatment equipment on the other. This striking structure brings a note of high modernity to the scheme. Its designer, Stephen Teeple, created a uniquely 21st century cross between a garden folly and an industrial installation.

Not surprisingly, water plays a large role in the park, most noticeably in a trio of heroic concrete sculptures. Rising nine metres from the ground, each has two “arms” that reach outward; water pours from these arms and then enters a 240-metre channel that flows down to the lake. Though incomplete, they are already landmarks, quite able to hold their own against the Gardiner Expressway just north.

The channel, and the attached “weirs,” are an integral part of the water-cleaning process as well as a source of pleasure, compelling and utilitarian at the same time. This also helps connect the park’s two halves.